ThoughtSpot Inc., an analytics startup led by former Nutanix Inc. executives, today announced that it has landed a $248 million funding round at a $1.95 billion valuation.

The investment was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Silver Lake Waterman and existing backers. It marks the fifth time ThoughtSpot has taken in outside capital to date, bringing the startup’s total raised to more than a half-billion dollars. The seven-year-old company is now better-funded than newly public Pinterest Inc. and Crowdstrike Inc. were at the same age.

ThoughtSpot has developed a business intelligence platform that reduces companies’ need for highly trained data scientists. Normally, visualizing information like quarterly sales results requires an expert to manually cobble together a dashboard with graphs. In ThoughtSpot, a worker can simply specify the information they wish to analyze and the platform will generate a visualization automatically.

The main way users interact with the service is through a search bar. A query along the lines of “what were our top-selling products by state” would bring up a color-coded map of the U.S. populated with relevant data about each market. A request such as “show sales by date,” in turn, might prompt ThoughtSpot to generate a bar chart displaying revenue figures for the last three months. 

The heavy lifting is done behind the scenes by dozens of artificial intelligence algorithms that also spot interesting patterns in data. In the hypothetical color-coded sales map, ThoughtSpot could highlight states where a normally popular product underperforms.

The startup was founded in 2012 by engineers hailing from companies such as Nutanix, Facebook Inc. and Google LLC. Chief Executive Sudheesh Nair came aboard in early 2018 after serving as Nutanix’s president. He took over that role from ThoughtSpot co-founder Ajeet Singh, who in turn was a member of the hyperconverged infrastructure maker’s founding team.

Since launching in 2012, ThoughtSpot has landed deals with major enterprises such as Walmart Inc., Hulu LLC and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG. The startup now claims it’s seeing 132% year-over-year revenue growth with an average deal size of $250,000.

ThoughtSpot will use the new $248 million in funding to expand its international presence and speed up product development plans. 

Photo: ThoughtSpot